this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
92 points (95.1% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5301 readers
431 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7
92
AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions, researchers say (theconversation.com)
submitted 8 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/climate
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267315

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Blueberrydreamer@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Except you're both fundamentally wrong about how data center cooling works. It's not closed loop water cooling, they use evaporative cooling by misting the cooling air. There's no 'great distraction' here, just some attention to one of very many problems with how we run large data centers.

[–] Immersive_Matthew@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

Google’s data centres use 4.3B gallons of water a year which is about the same as a city of 100,000 people. I think we have bigger things to worry about. Like MUCH bigger things than a literally drop in the bucket.